Egyptian avenue

There is nothing like this striking portal to the city of the dead in any other English cemetery.

        Set between a pair of obelisks is an Egyptian archway, flanked by pairs of lotus-bud columns. Old engravings clearly show that the cornice continued above the opening, giving it a much more imposing appearance, and also a more obviously Egyptian one: right in the centre was the familiar motif of a winged disc. This was a sure marker of the Egyptian style; it appeared for example in the ground floor cornice of the famous ‘Egyptian Hall’ in Piccadilly (1812; demolished in 1904). Indeed, this façade provided Highgate's architect Stephen Geary – who was no scholar, so far as we know – with all the Egyptian details he needed.

        The design would have appealed to the imagination of a public fascinated by Egyptian antiquities. According to one account, ‘The angular aperture, with the heavy cornice, embellished with the flying serpent, and other oriental ornaments; the Egyptian pillars, and the well-proportioned obelisks that rise gracefully on each side of the entrance recalls to the imagination the sepulchral temples at Thebes, described by Belzoni.’ Signor Belzoni’s celebrated exhibition which included reconstructions of Egyptian tombs and models of temples and pyramids had attracted great crowds to the Egyptian Hall in 1821-22.

        The Egyptian Avenue was a remarkable landscape feature about which the London Cemetery Company boasted in its advertisements: ‘the largest specimen of that rare style of architecture in this country’. James Stevens Curl has described it as a ‘commercial-curiosity type of architecture’ which ‘owed more to the fairground than to impeccable sources’, but there is no harm in that. A much duller alternative is the scholarly seriousness of the Egyptian entrance to Abney Park Cemetery (1840) designed by the Egyptologist Joseph Bonomi junior: real sources, real hieroglyphs and real stone, but completely lacking the verve of Geary’s design.

        Some visitors ask if the Avenue was coloured, but there is no record of this, and no surviving traces of paint. It would have been very odd had a polychromatic scheme existed for this to have been passed over without notice. Hittorff’s researches into Greek architectural polychromy had only been published within the previous ten years and buildings inspired by such knowledge had yet to appear; it was probably the same with the Egyptian style.  We would have heard about it.

        Past the entrance archway is the Avenue itself. Remarkably, this was originally even more dramatic as it was a tunnel, not an open avenue; you can see the profile in the bridge at the far end and the springing all along the sides. Perhaps there were some skylights to lessen the gloom, as in the Terrace Catacombs, but the effect was cold and stony and visitors imagined that they were walking through an Egyptian tomb. There is a row of eight private family vaults on either side, each with room for twelve coffins inside, but most are less than half full. They have heavy cast-iron doors, decorated with an inverted torch, cast by the founder Hervey Burnett of London. Sales of these vaults were slow until the roof of the tunnel was removed in the 1870s.